^Mi»i3^SStiit^a^^^^ 



ADDRESS ^ 



Honorable Charles H, Brough 



Governor of Arkansas 



ANNUAL MEETING 



Missouri Bar Association 



At Saint Louis 



SEPTEMBER 20th, 1918 



^'%'" 



ADDRESS BY 

HONORABLE CHARLES H. BROUGH 

At Meeting of 

MISSOURI BAR ASSOCIATION 



Mr. President Jones, 
Mr. Secretary Haid, 
and Gentlemen of the Missouri Bar Association: 

I very greatly appreciate, as Governor of the State of Arkansas 
the compliment that has been done my State by the very highly 
appreciated invitation on the part of your distinguished president, 
President Jones, and your able secretary, Mr. Haid, who has been 
associated with some of the lawyers of our State in rate cases and in 
matters affecting interstate commerce, to deliver an address before 
the able gentlemen composing the thirty-sixth annual session of the 
Missouri Bar Association. 

I congratulate you, gentlemen, upon the fact that, while last 
year you had only seventeen local bar associations in your State, now 
you have seventy-three. And I congratulate you also upon the very 
thoughtful measure that the Bar Association worked out, of proposing 
a War Council composed of one hundred and three of your able repre- 
sentatives to co-operate with the legal advisory boards and with the 
district exemption boards of Missouri in solving the great problems 
connected with our present war. 

As you gentlemen doubtless know, these district exemption 
boards will be immediately increased by the Provost Marshal Gen- 
eral — a very brilliant Missourian and a former practitioner at the 
Missouri Bar — from five to seven. And therefore at least four more 
of your able lawyers will be placed upon the district exemption boards 
of your State. 

I congratulate our neighboring and sister State of Missouri that 
she has given nearly three hundred thousand of her brave sons to 
place their bodies as living walls between the cause of human liberty 
and human democracy and those who would destroy it. 

I congratulate the great city of St. Louis, which is one of our 
metropolitan centers with which we are closely connected by the mystic 
tie that binds, upon the fact that one out of every fourteen men of 
eligible age, and I may say one out of every fourteen St. Louisans, 
are in this great war; and upon the fact that this city, which has been 
allotted the tremendous total of one hundred and thirty two millions 
for various war purposes, has oversubscribed her quota and has raised 
the magnificent sum of one hundred and sixty eight millions of dollars! 
(Applause.) 

Gentlemen, in this city of St. Louis in the great State of Missouri 
this morning I feel that I stand upon sacred soil, for I remember that 
that child of poverty, that youth of adversity, that man of virtue 
and honesty who is today in command of our forces on the Western 
front and who will go down in the annals of American military history 
alongside of Washington and Jackson, Lee and Grant — General John 
J. Pershing — (applause) is from your State. 

And I am reminded also, and I am sure that you profoundly 
regret that he could not be present, that that masterful Provost 
Marshal General of the United States, who has worked out the demo- 

— 1— 

MAY 4 i'^'*' 



cratic selective draft system, in a most efficient manner, in a manner 
that so appealed to Congress that he was offered the commission of 
Lieutenant General, which he declined, is also a native of the great 
State of Missouri — Provost Marshal General Enoch H. Crowder. 
(Applause.) 

I once heard your State described by one of your distinguished 
Governors, Governor Herbert Hadley, as the land of the big red apple, 
the little red hen and the much-read Bible; and I want to tell you one 
thing in connection with that about my own State. You have heard 
Arkansas referred to as the land of the Arkansaw Traveler, with his 
coonskin cap, coming to the fork of the road, not knowing which fork 
to take. My friends, I just want to remind you that we are living in 
altogether a different State now; in a State that really lives up to the 
fact that she is especially favored of the Lord in being the only State 
in the Union mentioned in the Bible — for we read in that Book of Genesis 
that "Noah looked out of the ark and saw." (Laughter and applause.) 

Our economic resources are limitless, and we could build a Chinese 
Tartary wall around our State and every one of our 2,000,000 people 
be practically independent of the outside world. Our apples have 
captured the first prize at the last six International Expositions, and 
the largest apple ever placed on exhibition in the world was an apple 
raised near Sulphur Springs in Benton County, which weighed 29 H 
ounces. The soft blushes of our famous Elberta peaches nestle in 
the snow-white virginity of our fields of cotton, and the only solid 
carload of peaches that was ever shipped abroad was sent to London 
some three years ago by Mr. Bert Johnson, an Arkansas truck-grower, 
living at Highland, in Pike County. With a cotton yield of approx- 
imately 1,100,000 bales, we have advanced within the past five years 
from seventh place to third place as a cotton-producing State. Our 
corn and other cereal acreage this year, under the inspiration of the 
Profitable Farming Movement, has increased fully 35 per cent, and 
our rice crop for 1918 will approximate 7,000,000 bushels. We have 
the largest acreage yield of rice in the world on the beautiful prairie 
stretching from Little Rock to Memphis. Eighteen of our counties 
have valuable deposits of semi-anthracite coal, and the smokeless 
coal now used by the United States in Saline County. We rank first 
in the production of ash, cottonwood and red gum; third in the pro- 
duction of hickory and oak, and fifth in the production of yellow pine 
in the United States. We have the only diamond mine on the western 
hemisphere in Pike County, a mile and a half from Murfreesboro, 
from which over 4,000 genuine diamonds have already been taken. 
Our lead and zinc mines in northwest Arkansas are beginning to rival 
the famous mines in Joplin, Mo. Montgomery County, Arkansas, 
could furnish you all the slate that you need to roof every house in 
your great city. 

Our State is on an absolutely cash basis, with a secured indebted- 
ness of $750,000. Our higher institutions of learning have been taken 
out of politics and rendered independent of legislative lobbies by being 
placed on a special millage basis. We have recently enabled our 
struggling school districts to levy a maximum of 12 mills rather than 
a minimum of 7 mills, as heretofore, for local school purposes, and 
nearly 400,000 school children are today enrolled in our public schools. 
We have a compulsory education law which requires children between 
the ages of 7 and 15 to attend school at least three-fourths of the school 
term. We have taken advantage of the Shackleford Good Roads 
Law, introduced by a distinguished congressman from Missouri, and 
within the next five years will receive from the federal and state gov- 
ernments $1,500,000 for the improvement of our highways. The third 
road project in the United States to be undertaken under the provisions 
of the Shackleford Act is a substantial asphalt road Vv^ith Warrenite 



surface, five and three-tenths miles in length, leading up to the canton- 
ment, the headquarters of the 87th Division of the United States 
Army, where 46,000 troops will soon be stationed. We have recently 
secured an aviation school at Lonoke. Arkansas has furnished over 
7,000 volunteer soldiers to the National Guard, and over 10,000 
selected troops to our National Army, and 79,842 of her brave sons to 
various branches of our military and naval service. A generous en- 
couragement is given to capital to be invested in the virgin resources 
of our commonwealth, and our bankers are rapidly becoming veritable 
captains of industry. A constitutional convention assembled on the 
19th of November to frame a new organic law in our State, which will 
undoubtedly secure to state, counties and minor political subdivisions 
the right to issue bonds for internal improvements without resorting 
to the subterfuge of the improvement district, curtail the evil of 
local legislation, make more stable the tenure of officers and enact 
other reforms that will virtually remake our State. 

We have taken the initiative among Southern States in giving 
our splendid womanhood the right of suffrage in primary elections. 
We have established a rigid examination for admission to the bar, 
this examination to be held in open court by attorneys appointed by 
the court, and have prescribed written examinations to be passed on 
by a body designated by the Supreme Court of our State. There 
is now pending an amendment designed to increase the membership 
of our Supreme Court from five to seven, creating a bipartite division 
of the court, with the Chief Justice alternating as the presiding judge 
in each division, a plan already in vogue in California, which greatly 
expedites the business of our highest tribunal. 

The population of our State is a substantial middle class, where 
there is neither the froth of aristocracy nor the dregs of the submerged 
tenth. Over 80 per cent of our people live right out in the country, 
and we are not confronted with the ills in our commonwealth of con- 
gested city populations, with their tenement districts on the one hand 
and the idle rich on the other; 3,500,000 acres of cut-over land, which 
can be secured from $5.00 to $10.00 an acre, await desirable immigra- 
tion within the confines of our State, and these lands may be secured 
from our enterprising lumber companies on most reasonable terms, 
as to length of the loans and condition of payment. We are rapidly 
introducing improved breeds of cattle, hogs and poultry, eradicating 
the cattle tick by means of the dipping vat, conserving the health of 
our people by proper sanitary measures and ushering in an age of 
peace and prosperity. Someone has humorously said with reference 
to our hog industry that "if all the hogs of Arkansas could be put 
into one hog, we would have a hog with a snout long enough and strong 
enough to dig the Panama Canal without any steam shovels." At 
Hot Springs, Heber Springs and other noted health resorts in our State, 
a modern Ponce de Leon may find fountains of perpetual youth. 

When I tell you, gentlemen, that the assessed valuation of the 
property of our State has increased over sixty millions within a single 
year, it is certainly evidence not only of our unexampled prosperity, 
but of substantial reforms in our fiscal and assessment systems. 
Arkansas is no longer a provincial and homespun commonwealth, 
but is a State that has an empire of vision in her brain. 
"We are broad backed, brown handed. 

Upright as our pines. 
And by the scales of a hemisphere 
Shape our designs." 

Gentlemen of the Missouri Bar Association, I feel very highly 
honored to be asked to deliver an address before this distinguished 
body, for although I have only been an active practitioner for a very 
few years, having held the chair of political economy in the State 

—3— 



University of my State before I fell from grace and entered politics, 
nevertheless I am thoroughly convinced of the fact that the law is 
the greatest of all the sciences and professions, for Hooker says, 
"She hath her seat in the bosom of God; her voice is the harmony of 
spheres. All things pay obeisance to her; the greatest is not exempt 
from her power and the least as feeling her protecting care." 
"Sovereign Lord, our State's collected well, 
Sits empress, crowning good, depressing ill." 

From the days of the Corpus Jurist Civillis and Pendects of 
Justinian, through the democratic folk-Germots of the early Anglo- 
Saxons, and the notable reforms made by the great Napoleon in 
compiling the Code Napoleon, which is now the basis of jurisprudence 
in the State of Louisiana, to our present jury system, our courts have 
been held in the highest reverence. For the people of every country 
and every clime have recognized that "a virtuous court, a world to 
virtue draws." It is a significant fact that every great reform in con- 
stitutional progress from the days of the Magna Charta, which the 
nobles wrested from King James on the Field of Runnemede, to the 
present time, including such historic instruments as the constitution 
of the United States, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the modernized 
state constitutions including the initiative and referendum, the three 
reform bills of Mr. Gladstone, and the development of the Roman 
Canon Law applied to ecclesiastical disputes, have been wrought out 
by eminent lawyers, sitting as Nestors of wisdom in constitutional 
conventions, legislatures and parliaments, and sitting as judges on 
the highest benches of the world. It is doubtful whether anything 
bespeaks more eloquently the genius of our government, with its 
innovation of a complete division of powers between the executive 
and the legislative and the judicial departments of governrnent, than 
our system of both state and federal courts with their original and 
appellate jurisdiction. And it is a significant fact that many of our 
eminent statesmen feel it a higher honor to have a place on the supreme 
bench of our nation than they do to reach the presidency itself. 

In this hour of our nation's stress and strife the lawyers are 
maintaining their ancient prestige. A lawyer. Provost Marshal 
General Crowder, is largely responsible for our democratic selective 
draft system which, operating through the new questionaire, will 
not only secure equality and justice in the selection of our soldiers from 
a great mass of volunteers, but will also take for the first time a census 
of the man-power of our country by occupation. Three lawyers in 
each of the nearly four thousand counties of the United States are 
serving without compensation on the legal advisory boards, and each 
district exemption board in the United States has at least one eminent 
lawyer as a part of its patriotic membership. Closely correlated with 
the gentlemen who are serving on the legal advisory boards are as- 
sociate members in each county who, purely because of their patriotic 
motives, are sacrificing lucrative practices to advise the drafted men 
of the five classes in filling out their questionaires. 

In the present constitutional convention of my own State — and 
I have been very much interested to read of your proceedings in con- 
nection with proposed codification or recodification of your laws — 
convened November 19th for the purpose of remodeling our organic 
law, in spite of the fact that an impression has been current that there 
has been prejudice among our people in the State of Arkansas against 
lawyers and against corporate interests, out of the one hundred and 
fourteen members of the present constitutional convention there is 
an overwhelming majority of lawyers; showing, gentlemen, that we 
in Arkansas, as you in Missouri and as the people of the other com- 
monwealths of our Union, recognize the tremendous value of lawyers 
and masters of jurisprudence in framing organic law. 

—4— 



I wish you, therefore, Godspeed in your contemplated recodifica- 
tion in the State of Missouri, and I hope that action will be taken 
at this session of the State Bar Association which will make Missouri 
a much more progressive State in the interpretation of the spirit 
as well as the letter of the law. Now, gentlemen, I was told by your 
president and by your secretary that you wanted at this meeting no 
technical discussion of any legal question, and it would be beyond 
the purview of my limited ability to give you such a technical dis- 
cussion as would interest you. I was asked to bring to you the message 
that wells up in every American heart today; the message of American 
patriotism and American preparedness, which words, in my humble 
opinion, sound the shibboleth and the clarion call of duty in this 
hour of our country's stress and strife, in this unparalleled war of 
liberty and democracy against autocracy and despotism. Our neu- 
trality is a thing of the past. The time has come when the proud 
prophecy has been fulfilled of our great President of the United States: 
"There will come that day when the world will say, 'This American 
that we thought was full of a multitude of contrary counsels now 
speaks with a great volume of the heart's accord, and that great 
heart of America has behind it the supreme moral force of righteousness 
and hope and the liberty of mankind.' " It is true that we are the 
mediating Nation of the world, combined of all nations, mediating 
their blood, their traditions, their sentiments, their tastes and their 
passions; but force of circumstances, the violation of the freedom of 
the high seas, which is the very sine qua non of peace, equality and 
co-operation, an insolent contempt for American idealism, American 
liberty and American justice has forced us into the maelstrom of the 
greatest conflict history has ever recorded. 

"The die is cast; the Rubicon is crossed;" henceforth we should 
all be Americans, knowing no hyphenated citizenship, no lukewarm 
support of our Government, no cliques and cabals undermining the 
force of our democracy, but everywhere responding to that other 
sentiment dear to every American heart, "liberty and democracy, 
now and forever, one and inseparable." Let us realize that while 
we should maintain no spirit of hatred toward the German people, 
an efficient, intelligent and expansive Nation, that a steadfast concern 
for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of demo- 
cratic nations; that no autocratic government, manned by a German 
Kai.ser, and Austrian Emperor, or a Bulgarian King, can be trusted 
to keep faith with any, or observe its covenants; that there must be 
a league of honor, a partnership of opinion, and that in this struggle 
all the interests of mankind are paramount to the interests of any 
nationality. Let us hope that this stands out above all the other 
wars of history as a people's war, a war for freedom and justice, a 
self-government among all the nations of the world, a war to make 
the world safe for democracy," the German people themselves included; 
a war, the successful result of which on the part of America and her 
allies will teach that might is no longer right, and strength is no longer 
triumphant. In this contest there can be no twilight zone of American 
patriotism; our citizens must be either for the President and for the 
flag, or against the President and against the flag. 

Heretofore European battlefields have been magazines, lit by 
the fuse of ambition, and in the cannons' raking fire has been sealed 
the sovereignty of kings; but the American guns that will resound on 
the battlefields of France, Italy and Russia will reverberate in thunder- 
ing tones of exalted patriotism "that all governments derive their 
just powers from the consent of the governed." When our brave 
American soldiers and sailors return with the laurels of well-earned 
victory, wearing uniforms of consecrated service, and bearing the 
arms of a free republic, there will no longer be any German Kaisers, 
Austrian Emperors and ^Bulgarian Kings ^.to ruthlessly violate the 



treaties of a brave and helpless Belgium, to overrun and lay waste 
a struggling Poland, to massacre women and children and hospital 
nurses in chivalrous France, to butcher martyrs in Armenia, struggling 
against revolt and Mohammedanism, and to annex, by political grand 
larceny, the territory of Alpine-crested and sun-kissed Italy. No, the 
eyes of our fellow countrymen will behold a world democracy, presided 
over by leaders selected by the voice of the people; they will see arise 
before their eyes temples of human liberty, whose cornerstones will be 
justice and the equality of all men before the law. With such an epic 
picture before us and such noble ideals of feeling to our better selves, 
I believe that each and every patriotic American should feel today, 
as did Nathan Hale, one of the Revolutionary heroes, as he exclaimed, 
"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." 

We have reached the point in our patriotism where our faith is 
being put to the touchstone of our works, and we are soon to discover 
whether this love which we have professed through the years of our 
institutions, our country and our flag, is "but a sounding brass and 
a tinkling cymbal," or whether it is a great and vital inspiration of 
individual and national life. Our young men, with a devotion unex- 
celled in the history of the world, are leaving homes of love and affec- 
tion, where for years they have been enshrined in a father's devotion 
and wrapped in a mother's love; they have left fields of cotton and 
waving grain, vocal with the praise of happy husbandry and replete 
with the gladness of rewarded toil; many of them have sacrificed 
lucrative positions in the marts of trade to endure the hardships of 
camp life and dangers of the far-flung battle line — all, for the honor 
of their country and the glory of their flag. They are going gladly 
"somewhere in France," to offer, if need be, the last drop of blood 
in their veins as a free libation on the altar of constitutional liberty, 
in order that the whole world may witness the march of millions of 
emancipated political and industrial slaves "redeemed, regenerated 
and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation." 
It is our duty to see that they do not go half-clad, half-fed, unequipped 
or unprepared; to see that the war is not only fought, but financed; 
to prove our faith by our works to subscribe liberally to the six 
billion-dollar Fourth Liberty Loan Fund which is being raised, and 
the Red Cross and Allied War Drive crusades typical of twentieth 
century chivalrj', and to join in the food conservation movement, 
which will mean if a pledge card is signed for each of the twenty-two 
million families of the United States, and a meatless and wheatless 
day each week is observed, that nearly a quarter million bushels of 
wheat and two billion pounds of meat will be saved to be sent to our 
brave boys on the firing line. 

It is as true in the life of a nation as an individual, that "no one 
liveth to himself, and no one dieth to himself." We have become a 
world power, not in the sense of sinister intrigues with foreign govern- 
ments, nor in the assertion of economic dominion throughout the world, 
nor in the abandonment of our ancient traditions, or isolation in the 
politics of other nations, but in our idealism in our mission of belting 
the earth with bands of the light of liberty and the love of democracy. 

"We are set, where ways are met. 
To lead the waiting nations on; 
Not for our own land is freedom's flag unfurled. 
But for the world." 

If the ruling military classes of Germany have divided the world 
into two parts — one conquered during the present war, and the other, 
which is the Western Hemisphere, to be conquered later — the United 
States hurls the challenge of democracy that will eventually make 
for the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. If Germany 
menaces the high seas by a nefarious submarine campaign, that is 

—6— 



worse than "the devil carrying a dirk in the dark," the United States 
replies that the free, constant, unthreatened intercourse of nations 
IS an essential part of the process of peace and of the development of 
commerce. If German intrigue fills the thrones of the Balkan States 
with German princes, puts German officers at the service of Turkey 
to drill her armies and make interest with her government, develops 
plans of sedition and rebellion in India and Egypt, and, like the ancient 
fire worshipers, set their fires in Persia— throwing a broad belt 
of German military power and political control across the center of 
Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia— the 
United States replies that the proud states of Bohemia and Hungary, 
the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, the indomitable Turks 
and the subtle peoples of the East have a right to their own national 
independence and their own political autonomv. The Macedonian 
cry is heard on every hand — "Come over and help us" — and the 
United States, like Peter and Paul of old, have heard the cry and are 
carrying to the oppressed nations of the war a gospel of life and an 
assurance of liberty. 

Just a word of warning here: you and I have been so thrilled 
recently within the last six weeks over Marshal Foch's brilliant victo- 
ries in capturing over 250,000 prisoners and over 2,000 machine guns, 
and penetrating the Hindenburg line and recapturing from four 
hundred to five hundred square miles of territory on the western front 
alone, and the reports in our newspapers are so glowing, that there is 
a prevalent opinion on the part of our citizens that this great holocaust, 
which has already cost approximately twenty-two million human 
lives, and has involved an expenditure of approximately one hundred 
and seventeen billion four hundred millions of dollars, or four times 
the combined war debt of the world, that this great holocaust is going 
to have its end within another year and that perhaps by next Christmas 
we can eat Christmas dinner in Berlin. (Applause.) 

I am not an expert on military affairs, my friends, but we have a 
great camp in our capital city. Camp Pike, where thousands of splendid 
Missouri boys are stationed; where we have sixty thousand men at 
the present time; where the United States Government is now spending 
an additional five million of dollars at the present time to give it a 
capacity of seventy-five thousand men. Frequently I talk with the 
commanding officers of that camp on military questions, and, my 
friends, if you talked with military officials of the United States, if 
you talked with President Wilson, as I have — and I esteem it an honor 
to have sat at the feet, as a scholar, of that man who, today, combining 
as he does the patriotism of a Washington, the philosophy of a Thomas 
Jefferson, the constructive genius of an Alexander Hamilton, the cour- 
age of an Andrew Jackson, a Grover Cleveland and a Theodore Roose- 
velt (applause), the sweet charity of an Abraham Lincoln and a William 
McKinley, and the judicial poise of a William Howard Taft, is destined, 
in my opinion, to go down in American history as one of the greatest 
men who ever sat in the presidential chair — President Woodrow Wilson. 
(Continued applause). 

— If you had talked with President Wilson and had seen the lines 
of care on his face, if you had talked with Secretary of War Baker, 
with Provost Marshal General Crowder, with Adjutant General 
McCain and with General Carter, and the men in command of our 
military forces, you would be convinced, as I am, and you would go 
back to your respective communities and prepare the people of your 
respective communities for a long, hard war; and also prepare them 
for the fact that they must yet break the alabaster box of their oint- 
ment of sacrifice, and perhaps for two or three years yet to come of 
rehabilitation work wander through the valley of the shadow of sacri- 
fice. 



You and I must reflect upon the fact that the territory of our 
great enemy is four times the size o( its territory at the outbreak of 
of the war. 

It occupies thirteen million square miles of territory. Gemany 
has already conquered Servia, Montenegro, Roumania, two hundred 
and ninety-three square miles in France, eighty-five per cent of Bel- 
gium, a thousand square miles of Italy, and the Russian provinces of 
Riga, Livonia, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Esthonia and Ukraine — 
the Ukraine alone being the size of the German Empire at the beginning 
of the war, with a population of approximately thirty-three millions 
of people. 

We can not starve our enemy out, whether we are victorious on 
both fronts; she can not be starved out. Her crop this year is twenty- 
seven per cent greater than it was last year, according to official 
estimates; and she now has access to all the rich grain fields of Russia, 
with two million five hundred thousand Russian prisoners to work 
these grain fields for her.) 

Not only that, my friends, but you and I have talked with French 
officers recently, right from the battle front; and we must remember 
this fact, that the numerical superiority of the Allies has not yet been 
definitely established on the Western front. While the morale and 
the esprit de corps of our troops is infinitely higher today than the 
morale and the esprit de corps of the German troops, yet Germany 
has approximately today four million men on the Western front, 
and the numerical superiority of the Allies has not yet been established. 
By the first day of July next year, when it is proposed to put an army 
of four million Americans on the Western front, that superiority will 
have been definitely established; but it is a condition and not a theory 
that confronts us, and I plead with you, gentlemen, as leaders in your 
respective communities — and you are leaders, because every man who 
stands high at the bar is a leader in his community — to go back and 
counteract the impression that is becoming prevalent among the 
communities of the United States that we are going to eat Christmas 
dinner in Berlin and that the war will be over in another year, so far 
as all military preparations are concerned. 

I believe that the military leaders of this great country are firm 
in their belief, and I share the hope, that an optimistic view can be 
taken as to the length of the war, but it is the part of patriotism to 
prepare our people for a period of long struggle, har d war and long- 
continued sacrifice. 

While Bulgaria has already been eliminated from the trinity of 
the Central Teutonic Powers, and even threatens vengeance against 
her traditional enemy, Turkey; while the German government, through 
the new Chancellor, Maximilian of Baden, has already hearkened to 
the cry of a rapidly dismembering Austria singing the Marsellaise 
and crying for bread in the streets of Vienna, as red-blooded Americans 
we can accept no dictated peace, neither can we stop short of the 
realization of our noble ideal of making the world safe for democracy, 
the German people themselves included. Maximilian's voice is the 
voice of the Jacob of pacifism, but his hand is the hand of the Esau 
of militarism. We can afford to grant no armistice until Germany 
is completely disarmed and the German people themselves thoroughly 
realize that "might is no longer right, and strength is no longer tri- 
umphant." So let our army and navy continue to wear the armor of 
preparedness and patriotism, and let our civilian population continue 
to gird themselves in the righteousness of sacrifice. Our President is 
a tried and true leader, capable of his every step, for he is the chosen 
spokesman of a fratricidal world. Let us be patient, and not too 
optimistic that a world's peace can be secured by Christmas, or even 
by next summer, and let us continue "to press forward toward the 

—8 — 



prize of the high calling of our manifest destiny," as the world's leader 
m battles for righteousness and chosen arbiter in the epoch-making 
councils of peace. 

But gentlemen, don't misunderstand me this morning in giving 
you this note of warning to carry back to your respective communities. 
Just as surely as you and I are in this beautiful room at the Hotel 
Statler, convened in the thirty-sixth session of the Missouri Bar 
Association, gentlemen, we are going to win. We are going to achieve 
a glorious victory, and before we get through with it we are going to 
put the old Kaiser absolutely out of business. (Applause). 

We are going to win, in the first place, because of the superiority 
of our form of government. I, for one, recognize the German people 
as a very intelligent people, as a very scientific people, as the greatest 
military power that the world ever knew; as a very frugal people; 
as a very thrifty people. And, coming from a State where we have 
thousands of Germans and where, in one of the seventy-five counties 
of my State, the Germans are in the majority, I take pleasure this 
morning in testifying to the fact — and I have made a very careful 
examination of this situation — that from ninety to ninety-five per 
cent of the German-Americans in our State are absolutely loyal to 
our flag, loyal to our institutions and loyal to our form of govern- 
ment. (Applause.) 

Why are they loyal? In the first place, they have been over here 
long enough to have absorbed the spirit of our institutions. In the 
second place, either they or their ancestors before them were driven 
from Germany by the very blood and iron military program against 
which we are now battling. 

But while we have a very high regard for the intelligence, for the 
scientific attainments, for the spirit of thrift and frugality that has 
permeated Germany's economic life, their form of government is 
like the house that Christ described, that was built upon the sand, and 
when the winds blew and the storms beat upon that house it fell 
because it was built upon the sand. 

What is Germany's form of government? Why, gentleman, it 
is a complete autocracy. It is based on the theory not only of the 
divine right of kings, but by the divine right of God himself. "Qui 
placuit regi habet viris legorem." "What pleases the Kaiser has the 
force of law." 

It matters not that the Kaiser has at his right shoulder an arm 
which he never allows to be taken in a picture, an arm which is the 
product of an hereditary unmentionable disease in the Hohenzollern 
family. It matters not that his father, who was an infinitely better 
man than the present Kaiser, and who, had he lived, would never 
have been guilty of this atrocious world war, had to have three opera- 
tions performed upon his throat by eminent surgeons, from which 
he eventually died as a result of the same hereditary, unmentionable 
disease in the Hohenzollern family — the German people have been 
religiously taught for fifty years that the Kaiser speaks not only as 
the representative of the divine right of kings, but as the divine 
representative of God himself. 

The German people believe he speaks as one who has the authority 
of Elijah, Elisha, Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the long line 
of canonical prophets. Their educational system, one of the most 
magnificent in the world, ranking next to that of Switzerland in 
efficiency, is permeated with this teaching, this idea, among all its 
schools; in the great Universities of Dresden, Leipzig, Heidelberg, 
Gottingen and Berlin they have been taught the cruel and militant 
philosophy of Nietzsche, Treitschke, and Von Bernhardi, that the 
German is a superman and that by virtue of the law of the survival 

—9— 



of the fittest he is entitled not only to rule over "Mittel Europa," but 
that this dominion is established over the world. 

You have read von Bernhardi's great work, "Germany and the 
Next War," published in 1911, that had five editions in the United 
States prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, and you will remember 
that in that most remarkable work, which has now become a part 
of Prussia and is Prussianism itself, that von Bernhardi states posi- 
tively that the economic necessities of the German Empire justify a 
world war; that a world war will be waged, and that Germany is going 
to be the victor in that world war. 

Now, gentlemen, in contradistinction to Germany's form of 
government, a complete autocracy, what is the form of government 
that we have in this country? It is a complete democracy; the rule 
of the people, a government of the people, for the people, and by the 
people, which the great Abraham Lincoln said, "Shall not perish from 
the face of the earth." 

The American Constitution, under which you and I live today, 
has been pronounced by Mr. Gladstone, who, next to Lloyd George, 
is perhaps the greatest statesman that England ever produced, "as 
the most wonderful document ever struck off at a given time by the 
brain and by the purpose of man." By virtue of the elastic construc- 
tion of the Constitution of the United States, men of all countries 
have been brought together and have been inspired with a passionate 
loyalty to a lofty ideal; and, whether the material thrown into that 
crucible be the "thoughtful Englishman, the jolly Irishman, the bril- 
liant Frenchman, the thrifty German, the hard-working Scandinavian, 
the temperamental Italian or the loyal negro, it emerges with the 
dross refined and shines forth resplendent as the purest gold of 
humanity, the modern American. (Applause.) 

America takes but to give again. 

As the sea returns her rivers in rain, 

So she gathers the chosen of her seed 

From the haunted of every race and creed; 

Her German dwells by the gentle Rhine, 

Her Ireland sees the old sunburst shine, 

Her France dreams some dream divine, 

Her Norway still clings to her mountain pine. 

And, broad-based under all. 

Is planted England's broken-hearted mood, 

As rich in fortitude 

As ever went worldward from the Island wall; 

Fused into her candid light. 

All races here into one great race unite. 

Hereditary foemen forget their sword 'and slogan, 

Kith and clan; 'twas glory once to be a Roman; 

America makes it a glory now to be a MAN! 
(Applause.) 

Gentlemen, that is the spirit of our Government; that is the 
spirit of our law; that is the spirit of our military preparedness. And 
with that principle of individuality, with the spirit that the latch 
string of the humble cottage is as sacred as the sculptured entrance of 
the palatial lodge, that principle by which an humble Missouri or Arkansas 
boy may reach the highest position within the gift of the army and 
navy of the United States, and may one day wear laurels the equal of 
the baton of a Grand Marshal of France — it is this principle of democ- 
racy that has enabled our troops "as good as the Kaiser's best" to 
withstand the terrific German onslaught at Chateau Thierry and 
wipe out the famous St. Mihiel salient, the last German salient in 
France, with the capture of 30,000 prisoners in twenty-seven hours, 
that has alreadj' stamped the brave boys in khaki as the finest soldiers 

—10— 



in the world, combining as they do the stubbornness of the English- 
man with the brilliancy of the French, the initiative of the Italian, 
and something which is peculiarly and indefinably Amencart. (Ap- 
pluase.) 

Our brave soldiers and marines, whom the Germans last sunimer 
derisively called "teufel hunden," or "devil dogs," have within a 
single year brought the military party of Germany to its knees by 
their brilliant achievements, they have poured into France in a 
mighty golden stream of 300,000 a month, and have turned the red 
tide of battle Rhineward. Thev have proven themselves as good as 
the best shock troops of the Allies, as good as the Alpini or the be- 
feathered Berseglieri of Italy, the Blue Devils of France, the naked- 
kneed Highlanders of Scotland, as good as the best of the bulldog 
breed of New Zealand or Australia, as good as the bravest of the 
lion's litter from England or Canada— all because of the nobility of 
the ideals and the spirit of democracy for which they are fighting. 
Thev are Cavaliers worthy of the knightly traditions of Richard Coeur 
de Lion or Godfrey of Bouillon. The Poilu and the Tommy love him 
because of the unselfishness and efficiency of his service, and in the 
golden years to come they will cherish their comradeship with our 
brave American boys as the most priceless memory of their common 
service, nor will they forget — 

"The look of men that ha' bothered men by more than an easy hrcathj 
The eyes of men that ha' read with men in the open books of death. 
Gentlemen, practical men of affairs may say, "Wars are not won 
by differences in ideals and forms of government; although we are 
battling for the great ideal of making the world safe for democracy 
and democracy safe for the world, wars are not won by differences 
in forms of government. Wars are won by heavy artillery. 

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that "God is on the side of the 
heavy artillery." I am inclined to think that God is oftentimes on 
the side of the heavy artillery; but, thank God, we have the heavy 
artillery in the United States to win this war. (Applause.) 

We have the wealth of the world. Bradstreet says that last 
winter we had two hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars worth 
of wealth. England ranks next, with eighty billions; Germany next, 
with seventy-four billions; and France next, with sixty billions. 
Our wealth is so great that if, as our good Socialist friends suggest, 
the property of the United States was evenly divided, every 
man, woman and child in this country would have two thousand and 
thirty dollars' worth of property. But property is not the test ot the 
ability of the people to subscribe for Fourth Liberty Loan bonds 
the Red Cross, and a War Allied Drive. Income is the best test ot 
a person's ability to pay taxes and lend money. 

How does the income of the United States compare with the 
income of other countries? The income of the United btates is i ty- 
four billions of dollars a year; England ranks next with twenty-three 
billions a year. Gentlemen, that explains how in a single year, we 
can float twenty-six billion dollars' worth of loans; why Congress 
enacted recently a new revenue bill which provided for the addition 
of eight billions to the twenty-six billions we have a ready expended, 
three-fifths as much expended in a single year as this Government 
expended for all purposes during the one hundred and twenty-six 
years of our previous financial history. 

The income-producing power of our people is so tremendous, and 
is increasing from year to year. Then again, gentlemen, we can not 
be starved oVt as w^e take p'art in this war^ The farmers last year pro 
duced twenty-six billion dollars' worth of agricultural products^ 
How much is twenty-six billion dollars? A poor Governor has no 

—11 — 



conception of twenty-six billions of dollars. And perhaps a few of 
you distinguished lawyers have not. But I can illustrate. 

The entire wealth of my own dear State of Arkansas, with all 
its great resources, on a fifty per cent basis — and we have raised our 
assessments seventy-six millions of dollars within the past year through 
the passage of the Township Assessment Bill — the entire wealth of 
the State of Arkansas at the present time on a fifty per cent basis is 
five hundred and twenty millions of dollars. That means that we 
have a total wealth of one billion four hundred million of dollars for 
taxation purposes. That only represents about seventy-five per cent 
of our real wealth. The real wealth of the State of Arkansas would 
probably aggregate two and a half billions of dollars. In other words, 
the farmers of the United States last year produced over thirteen 
times the entire value of the State of Arkansas. The farmers of the 
United States are constantly increasing their wealth, in spite of drouths 
severe killing winters, and labor shortage, because our agriculture 
is becoming more intensive and scientific. The planting of winter 
wheat, rye and oats in our Southern States will partially compensate 
for the ravages of drouths and severe winters. 

We have not only got the property and the income-producing 
power, but the agricultural and manufactured products to win this 
war, but we also have the inventive genius in the United States. 

Germany has made wonderful strides in invention, particularly 
in the invention of munitions of war; but, gentlemen, perhaps I can 
give you a bit or two of official news this morning that may be surprising 
to some of you. 

A good many of the fathers and mothers of Missouri are worrying 
about the death of their boys in crossing the ocean. Did you ever 
stop to think that not a single American transport, convoyed by an 
American battleship or an American convoy, has yet been sunk? 

The Tuscania was sunk — twenty-eight hundred of our boys had 
their lives imperiled last month. But those were English cruisers or 
transports; they were not our own. 

Every American transport that has crossed the ocean since the 
month of March has been armed with the latest improved microphone 
of Mr. Edison, based on the theory of wireless electricity and the 
wave formations of the sea, and our vessels can absolutely detect the 
presence of a submarine either on the surface of the water or below 
the surface of the water, at a distance of sixteen miles. (Applause.) 

You and I were very much frightened last March when we read 
of the big Berthas of Germany. We were reminded of the discussion 
between the two negroes. One said that the Allies had a gun that could 
shoot twenty-five miles. The other said, "Why, shucks, that ain't 
nothin'. Them Germans has got a gun that all they axes fo' is yo' 
address." (Applause.) 

Well, we were very much frightened by the greatness of that gun 
that can shoot sixty-three miles, eighteen and one-tenth miles up in 
the air; that shoots a shot that weighs two hundred pounds and costs 
four thousand dollars a shot to shoot the gun. But, gentlemen, I 
bring you the official information this morning that at the Navy Yard 
in Washington, approved by the Bureau of Standards of the United 
States, there has been maufactured and is being manufactured a 
sixteen-inch gun, hammered to a twelve-inch gun at its muzzle — 
a gun within a gun, having a range of seventy-two miles. (Applause.) 

Mirabile dictu! Mirabile dictu! Last week the Kaiser and his 
imperial chancellor protested through the Spanish Ambassador that 
the use of gas was a violation of international law. (Laughter.) Do 
you gentlemen know why that protest came? Not, because the use of 
gas in the opinion of the Kaiser was a violation of the rules of inter- 

—12— 



national law, for the German government sanctioned the use of chlorine 
gas, mustard gas, and tear gas, and other gases, in violation of the 
Hague Tribunal, but because on the shores of Maryland, for thirty-five 
acres on the Baltimore & Ohio and for thirty-five acres on the Chesa- 
peake & Ohio there is being manufactured a concentrated chlorine 
gas that is so strong that it doesn't matter whether the Germans wear 
gas masks or not, it will eat its way right through any gas mask 
made. (Applause.) 

It will be a note of encouragement to the gentlemen of the State 
Bar Association of Missouri to know that a bomb was invented last 
October by a Pennsylvania inventor and presented to the Sixty-fourth 
Congress in executive session, which, if successfully operated, should 
prove the most dangerous weapon in the annals of military warfare. 
This bomb is seven feet high. It is operated by an air valve, which, 
timed with mathematical precision, causes a terrific explosion when 
the air strikes a chemical compound. It explodes by centripetal and 
centrifugal force, combining the joint effects of dynamite and black 
powder. It was recently tried out on Virginia islands on the eastern 
coast of the United States, and so terrific was the force of its explosion 
that it tore up every rock and tree within a radius of a haljf mile. 

The one weak spot in the heel of the American Achilles is being 
strengthened; that is our aviation service, without which a bomb of 
the size could not be effectively used. After Congress appropriated 
six hundred and ninety-six millions of dollars for the purchase of 
thirty thousand aeroplanes, we began to discover by Congressional 
investigations that German spies had gotten into those aeroplane 
factories and had substituted leaden parts for steel parts, with the 
result that a number of our brave aviators, many of whom are from 
the State of Missouri, have lost their lives. I have in the Governor's 
ofiRce at Little Rock, sent me by one of the boys I taught in the 
University of Arkansas, a beautifully mounted cane made of the 
crushed pieces of aeroplanes on which our aviators lost their lives on 
Kelly Field, Texas. 

But this situation is being remedied. The type of aeroplane 
that was defective has been rejected by General Pershing; we now 
have in the active service of this country approximately five thousand 
aeroplanes, and before next spring the entire Congressional program 
of thirty thousand aeroplanes will be completed, many of them of 
the Italian Caproni plane type, capable of carrying at least nine tons. 

Every one of us has our opinion of how this war will be won. 
Some agree with Simons and Repperton that we will win on the 
Western front, of Charmand that we will win on the Eastern front; 
some hold the theory — some say we will make wonderful advances this 
winter through the valley of the Moselle; others believe that there 
will be advances from the north, and we will blow up the fortifications 
at Helgoland, without the necessity of exposing our boys to those 
wonderful fortresses and the electric mines of Germany; but, gentlemen, 
my theory of the war is, and I believe that you will concur to a certain 
extent in this — my theory is that the final ending of this — and whether 
it's going to be this year or next year, or three years hence, we will 
all know that there's going to be two years of constructive work for 
our boys to do after the final victory is won, at least two years of recon- 
structive work before the troops can be withdrawn. My theory 
is that the war is going to be suddenly ended by a social, a political, 
and an economic revolution in Bulgaria, Austro-Hungary, and in 
Germany itself; and one of the most terrible factors in creating this 
social, political and economic revolution is going to be the efficient 
use of our aeroplanes — bombarding the Krupp Works at Essen, the 
Shodka Works in Bohemia, and the industrial towns of Germany, 
and causing the German people to realize that war is hell! (Applause.) 

—13— 



When the war is brought to their own doors, when we bombard 
the Krupp Works at Essen and the industrial centers of Germany and 
Austro-Hungary, then, in my humble opinion, this great military 
combination of the Central Teutonic Powers is going to crumble, and 
our t)oys, under the Stars and Stripes, marching between the fluttering 
and pro'ud banners of France, England and Italy, are going to show 
them a new step on the streets of Berlin, the stride of free men and 
Americans; and instead of the German song "Die Wacht Am Rhine" 
being sung, they are going to listen to the newer and more glorious 
song of a world made safe for democracy and a democracy made safe 
for the world! 

You may think, gentlemen, that I am rather old-fashioned in 
my views on this point; but, in the third place, I believe that it has 
been divinely decreed that we shall win this war, because, if Browning 
was correct when he sang "God is in his heaven and all is right with 
the world," this God, who holds within the hollow of His hand the 
destinies of nations as well as the lives of indivduals, is never going 
to permit the victory of a nation that has already made an unholy 
alliance with Turkey, that Sick Man of Europe, a monster that has 
butchered over two millions of Armenian Christians and piled their 
skulls up as high as Ghengis Khan piled his pyramid of human skulls 
up in an age of barbaric pillage and plunder. No matter whether a 
man is Jew or Gentile or a Protestant, he can never believe that God 
will sanction the victory of a ruler of a Christian nation who, in his 
addresses to his troops, proclamations, and public utterances, has 
never once mentioned the name of Christ. If any one of you learned 
gentlemen can show me a single proclamation or a single address of 
the Kaiser in which he has ever once mentioned the name of Christ, 
I will be very greatly obliged. 

You have frequently heard that wonderful combination that 
exists between "Ich" and "Gott," always placing the "Ich" before 
the "Gott," and making "Gott" the Go-at of the combination. 
(Laughter and applause.) But never once has the Kaiser mentioned 
the name of Christ. 

My friends, there have been tyrants throughout all history. 
This one is not the one alone of the breed who has hungered for 
empires. Alexander was a tyrant and conquered the then known 
world, but he died in a Bacchanalian revel, sighing for more worlds 
to conquer. Hannibal was a tyrant; he was probably greater than 
Alexander; he led his armies against imperial Rome, military mistress 
of the world, and struck the proud Roman legionaries and humbled 
their pride; he climbed the Pyrenees and almost realized his ambition 
to conquer the conqueror of his world; but Hannibal, too, met his 
crushing defeat at Tanea; his star was setting even while he was 
conquering on the Arno, and at Capua and Tarentum it went into 
its declension, and finally he, too, went the way of tyrants at Libyssa 
by taking poison, seven years after his overthrow on the field of Zama. 

Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps the most wonderful genius that 
the world has ever produced, was a tyrant. His sun began to rise at 
Marengo, and reached its meridian as Austerlitz, but it sank forever 
on the battlefield of Waterloo, and Napoleon died, a lone and a dis- 
appointed man, his soul lashed by the billows of ambition as relentlessly 
and unsparingly as ever the lonely rock of St. Helena was lashed by 
the surging billows of the Atlantic. And yet farther back let us go, 
back into ancient times, and you will find tyrants. There were 
Kaisers in Biblical times, who no whit suffered the less than their 
descendant of today shall suffer for his many sins. King Sennacherib 
was a Kaiser, ruling over Babylonia, lord over Syria and Egypt; a 
king, so run the shards, before whom monarchs trembled and potentates 

—14— 



humbled themselves; but the Lord saj's, in whatever station we 
occupy in life, that a proud spirit goeth before a fall and haughtiness 
before destruction; and He said these words to King Sennacherib 
through sturdy Prophet Hezekiah: "I know thy sitting down and 
they going out, and thy coming in and thy raging against Me, and 
because thy arrogancy is come up into my ears, therefore will I put 
my hook in thy nose "and My bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee 
back by the way which thou camest," spoke the Lord God of Hosts. 

You ask whether this prophecy was realized, whether the majesty 
of the God of history was vindicated? Lord Byron, by no means a 
religious poet, answers: 

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. 
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; 
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea 
When the blue wave rolls mightily on deep Galilee. 

Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green, 
That host with their banners at sunset were seen; 
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown. 
That host on the morrow lay wither'd and strewn. 

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast 
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; 
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, 
And their "hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still. 

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide. 
But throughit there rolled not the breath of his pride; 
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf. 
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. 

And there lay the rider distorted and pale. 
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail; 
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone. 
The lances uplifted, the trumpet unblown. 

And the widows of Asshur are loud in their wail. 
And the idols arc broke in the temple of Baal; 
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, 
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord. 

Read and re-read, my friends, the story of the destruction of Sen- 
nacherib. The stone crieth out of the wall, and the beam out of the 
timber, "Woe, woe to him that buildeth a tower with blood, and 
establisheth a city in iniquity!" 

Gentlemen, the whole purpose of the German government was 
to spread kultur throughout the world. Write the name, gentlemen 
of the Missouri Bar, write the name in relief worthy of their race: 
Kultur! KULTUR! 

K for killing! 

U for U-boat submarine menace! 

L for lies! 

T for treachery! 

U for unfaithfulness! 

R for ruthlessness! 

K-U-L-T-U-R! That spells kul-tur; and the kultur is the code 
of the ruling classes of Germany! But, thank God, there isn't enough 

—15— 



in von Hindenburg or von Mackensen or von Ludendorff to ram 
kultur down the throats of free and independent Americans! (Strong 
applause.) 

To you, gentlemen, as Governor of a neighboring State, here by 
virtue of your very kind invitation, may I extend from the very 
bottom of my heart our country's thanks for what you, as lawyers, 
are doing to make this war a glorious success; may I thank the mem- 
bers of the legal advisory boards in one hundred and fourteen counties 
in Missouri for the work they are doing and for the painstaking care 
they are taking in making out questionaires for our brave soldier 
boys? Each and every one of us must do our part to make the world 
safe for democracy and democracy safe for the world. My own opinion 
is, as I expressed at the beginning of this address, that the struggle 
will continue at least another year, considering the period of recon- 
struction work that will have to be done before we will resume normal 
times. We are going to have a great civil reconstruction work as well 
to do; economic, political and religious lines, in my opinion, are going 
to be entirely changed; politics is going to be fought out on entirely 
different lines, and our returning soldiers and sailors are destined to 
be the leaders in our public life. We will live in a period of vast recon- 
struction work for years yet to come. There will be much suffering, 
and there will be seen many a badge of mourning in every hamlet 
in the nearly six thousand counties of the United States and in every 
one of the forty-eight States in the American Union; but my friends, 
I am sure that our American mothers and our American fathers are 
going to have the same spirit that the fathers and mothers of France 
have had. 

You have heard the story, I am sure, of the English mother who 
had three sons killed in battle, and who, when the death of the third 
son was reported to her, instead of loud lamentations, exclaimed: 
"Who dies, if England lives? Who dies, if England lives?" 

And the French mother, who lost two of her boys in battle, instead 
of weeping and wailing and tearing her hair, when she saw the dear 
tri-color of France pass by, cried: "Vive la France!" Long live 
France ! 

Methinks that in after years, when the brave American boys 
with their flags flowing to the breeze shall return victorious from the 
battle-fields of Europe, and when during the entire time intervening 
we must make our fearful sacrifice in blood and money, instead of 
loud lamentations at our sacrifices, each and every one of us, as Old 
Glory passes by, will cry, "Vive la Democracy et Liberte!" Long live 
Liberty and Democracy! 

I thank you, gentlemen. 

(Sustained and continued applause.) 



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